Marc Louis Bourgeois

Marc Louis Bourgeois (1934-2025) was a French neuropsychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux. He was one of the pioneers in France of a medical psychiatry that was open to international models, and one of the most eminent founders of the contemporary Bordeaux school of university psychiatry.

Biography Marc Louis Bourgeois was born on 8 January 1934 in Paris and died on 1 December 2025 in Bordeaux. His family were originally from Picardy, and his father was an engineer with French National Railways. He attended the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris, and then passed the entrance examination for the medical military school in Bordeaux, otherwise known as the .

He studied medicine in Bordeaux, initially at the , where he trained in internal medicine, endocrinology, paediatrics and intensive care. In it, he referred to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, who had also defended a thesis on rheumatic diseases in 1853. thumb leftAfter passing the medical residency entrance examination, Marc Louis Bourgeois chose to specialise in neuropsychiatry. He began his residency in this speciality in 1962 at the highly prestigious , a neuropsychiatric centre where candidates were rigorously selected. Marc Louis Bourgeois worked there as a junior doctor and later as a senior registrar. For many years, he practised on the Psychiatric Observation Ward, an emergency department located in the basement of the building that handled all requests for compulsory psychiatric admission from the Gironde department. Paul Delmas-Marsalet played a significant role in shaping Bourgeois' view of psychiatry as primarily a medical speciality, as well as in his openness to international clinical and therapeutic models, particularly those of North American psychiatry. Marc Blanc (1915–1996), then the sole professor of psychiatry, decided that university psychiatrists who had previously practised at the general hospital should join the psychiatrists working in psychiatric hospitals.

After successfully passing the agrégation examination, Marc Bourgeois left for the USA in 1977 to work for a year at Stanford University.

Work and research Through his training as a neuropsychiatrist under Professors Delmas-Marsalet and Bergouignan, Marc Louis Bourgeois played a major role in France in the transmission and preservation of a medical model of psychiatry, both at the clinical and academic levels. In 1993, he wrote: “I personally believe it is necessary to uphold and reaffirm the ‘medical nature’ of psychiatry (mental medicine, psychological medicine, behavioural medicine) and the psychiatrist's identity as a doctor. Neither neuroscience nor psychoanalysis, it is a clinical speciality dealing with the psyche, suffering, its disorders and pathological behaviours, which requires both the modesty and rigour, the experience and empiricism of the doctor.” as well as to the validation and widespread use of standardised psychopathological assessment scales.

Marc Louis Bourgeois published as early as 1972 on ecology and the environment in psychiatry. From the late 1970s, he took an interest in the management of gender identity disorders, establishing a medical pathway for gender transition in collaboration with endocrinologists and plastic surgeons at Bordeaux University Hospital. He also contributed to a medical and non-stigmatising approach to addiction, and before substitution treatments were developed, people with opioid dependence were admitted to his department for Anesthélec ("current of Limoge") treatment. Following on from the mother-child hospitalisation programmes already established at the Centre Jean Abadie by Michel Bergouignan, Also following in Bergouignan's footsteps, At a time when the practice of electroconvulsive therapy was highly controversial, he consistently maintained access to this treatment —which was then administered using Paul Delmas-Marsalet's apparatus.

Marc Louis Bourgeois authored or co-authored over 500 scientific articles in indexed journals, covering studies and reviews in a wide range of fields, such as semiology and psychopathology, psychopharmacology, medical psychology, forensic psychiatry, and the history of psychiatry. Another major focus of his research and publications was on bereavement and its complications.

Marc-Louis Bourgeois is described by his pupils as a visionary physician with encyclopaedic knowledge. He acted as a bridge between the last generation of French neuropsychiatrists, and the first generation of psychiatrists with a medical vision of psychiatry.